A habitat gets a Pokémon to turn up. A built house is where it properly settles, and settled residents are what push their own Comfy Level and the whole area's Environment Level upward. If you are trying to drag an area out of the middle numbers, houses are the lever you pull.

The catch is that everybody you move in has preferences, and those preferences now have to survive contact with each other. Climate is the loud one: a Pokémon that wants the dark and a Pokémon that wants full sun are never going to agree on the thermostat. Then there is what they like having around, which decides whether one shared shelf of decorations pleases the room or pleases exactly one resident.

Do that for one house and it is a fun puzzle. Do it for a whole island, checking every candidate against everyone already inside, and it becomes admin. Enjoyable admin, but admin.

The Roommate Advisor works from an anchor. Pick a Pokémon, and it ranks every other one in the dex by how well the two would live together, best first. Point it at a house that already has residents and it scores candidates against the whole group instead, so the suggestion at the top is the one that fits everyone already in there, not just the last one you added.

The score is 0 to 100 and it is not a mystery box. Four things feed it:

• Same ideal climate — BiggestTwo Pokémon who want the same weather are already most of the way to getting along. Mismatch it and the card tells you which two climates are arguing.
• Shared favourites — StrongEveryone has up to five favourite item categories. Every one they have in common is one more thing you can put in the room that pleases both of them.
• Shared type — LightA small nudge. Two Water types are not automatically friends, but it never hurts.
• Shared specialty — LightAnother small nudge, for the pair who both wander off to chop the same tree.

Every result card shows its own reasoning, so you can see the shared loves and the climate verdict rather than taking a number on trust. And because you can see the reasoning, you can overrule it whenever you fancy. It is your island.

Raw scores are hard to feel, so each one gets a label. These are the five, best to worst:

• Soulmatemove them in immediately
• Best Budsa very easy yes
• Roomiesperfectly pleasant, no drama
• Friendlythey will cope
• Just Coworkerspolite nods in the hallway

Evolution lines usually land near the top, which is a decent sanity check: Charmander and Charmeleon want the same weather and love most of the same things, so they come out as Soulmates, exactly as anyone would expect.

A group score is the average of every pair inside it. Three residents means three pairs, four residents means six, and the average is what you see on the card.

Averages lie, though, so the card shows the range as well. A house sitting at 90 where every pair scores between 85 and 95 is genuinely harmonious. A house sitting at 90 built from one adoring couple and one resident everybody tolerates has the same headline number and a much worse story. The range is how you spot the third wheel before you finish decorating around them.

Once a group works, My Houses keeps it. Every saved house lists its residents, its group score and the items its residents actually want, so decorating is a shopping list rather than a guessing game. Name them or do not, search by house or by Pokémon, filter by area.

Moving somebody between houses is one click, with a few seconds of undo for when it turns out the old arrangement was better. Everything syncs to your account, so the island you planned on the laptop is the island your phone shows while you are actually playing.

None of this is decoration for its own sake. Content residents raise their own Comfy Level, Comfy residents lift the area they live in, and a higher Environment Level is what unlocks the next tier of things worth having. A well-sorted house is the most reliable way to move that number.

It works the other way too. Pull residents out of an area and the score sags, which can drag the Environment Level down with it and quietly re-lock things you had already earned. Rearranging is cheap in the app and not always cheap in the game, which is rather the point of trying it here first.

For the other half of the story, climates, Comfy Level and what makes a Pokémon settle in the first place, read how habitats work. For who is even available to move in, read how catching works.